Top 10 Innovations

Which are the up-and-coming technologies and which will have the biggest impact on health care in 2015? Cleveland Clinic’s culture of innovation naturally fosters a good deal of discussion about new “game changing” technologies and which ones will have the greatest impact each year. The passion of our clinicians and researchers for getting the best care for patients drives a continuous dialogue on what state-of-the art medical technologies are just over the horizon.

The annual Top 10 Medical Innovations was developed to share outside Cleveland Clinic what our clinical leaders are saying to each other and what innovations they feel will help shape healthcare over the next 12 months.

We use a rigorous process to gather the opinions of Cleveland Clinic physicians and researchers, create a field of nominated innovative technologies for consideration, and develop a consensus perspective of what will be the Top 10 Medical Innovations for the next year. Our team interviews more than 110 Cleveland Clinic experts to elicit their nominations.

To receive consideration, nominated technologies have to meet the following criteria:

The innovation must have significant clinical impact and offer significant patient benefit in comparison to current practices. It must also have high user-related functionality that improves health care delivery.

Nominated innovations must have a high probability of commercial success.

The innovation must be in or exiting clinical trials and be available on the market sometime in the coming year.

The innovation must have significant human interest in its application or benefits, and must have the ability to visualize human impact.

We probe the opinions of a broad cross-section of Cleveland Clinic staff from every major medical field. Our primary question is, “What innovations are “game changers” in your field?” In all, these interviews yield nearly 150 nominations of emerging technologies.

The nominated innovations are screened to confirm threshold criteria and consolidate duplicates. Our team prepares research on each technology and then presents a final list of over 55 up-and-coming technologies and their data profiles to two independent panels of leading Cleveland Clinic physicians. In late August, each panel meets to discuss, debate, and vote. The two panels then vote on the combined lists and establish our Top 10 Medical Innovations.